The Nature of Culture: Kroeber & Kluckhohn (1952) - academic definitions of culture · Descriptive: culture refers to "all social activities in the broadest sense, such as language, marriage, property system, etiquette, industries, art, etc."; the things that people do · Historical: culture means the total social heredity (vs. biological heredity) of mankind, while as a specific term a culture means a particular strain of social heredity · Normative: culture is all standardized social procedures and customs, passed on socially, that form a people's way of life · Structural: culture is a system or organisation of interdependent values common to specific social groups, forming pattern that is unique to each society · Psychological: culture consists of all results of human learned effort at adjustment; everything we do is an attempt at adjusting to out environment · Information acquired from other members of ones species through social learning that can affect one's behaviours · Group of individuals existing in some shared context What are the challenges in defining culture? · Cultural boundaries are fuzzy, unlike national boundaries · Culture is constantly changing (e.g. support for gay marriage & marijuana legalization in the US has gone up tremendously) · There is variation and overlap between and within cultures, which we tend to either underestimate or exaggerate General Psychology vs Cultural Psychology: General: the mind operates independently of content and context Cultural: the mind is shaped by content and context · Wilhelm Wundt (early 1900s): grandfather of modern psychology Examined low level processes · Established need for experimental control · Volkerpsychology (psychology of the people): talks of language, folk stories, religion & other higher level processes · These things are organic, and we must relax experimental control to study them · John Watson (early 1900s) - behaviourism · Human behaviours are simply what can be objectively measured as stimulus-response patterns o Stimulus-response arc o Everything we can measure or directly observe is psychology, and nothing else · Cognitive revolution (1950s) We have thoughts, feelings, and meaningful mental processes
· The brain as computer metaphor - reduces brain to simple hardware - a brain anywhere is the same as a brain anywhere else · History of psychology relies on white psychology, due to computer analogy · Richard Schweder (1980s) The environment impacts us, and we impact our culture · Our minds and the environment mutually constitute each other Ethnocentrism: judging people from other cultures by the standard's of one's own culture Russian cultural-historical school: school of thought that argued that people interact with their environments through tools passed down to them Types of Universality: · Non-universal (cultural invention): a cognitive tool not found in all cultures E.g. the abacus (cognitive tool) exists primarily within East Asian cultures · Existential universal: cognitive tool found in all cultures, but serve different functions in different cultures · E.g. the use of criticisms (cognitive tool) is used to reprimand/discourage in some cultures, but to motivate in others · Functional universal: cognitive tool found in all cultures and used